Richard Weitz, co-chairman of the WME group, is standing in the lobby of the agency’s new Beverly Hills headquarters on a recent afternoon. The space suddenly swells with agents, assistants, clients and others shuffling through for lunch. Some people split off to sit for a meal at 1898 — the plush new lobby restaurant operated by Wolfgang Puck that has taken over for Jack & Ben’s — while others grab something light from the café and huddle inside the many wood-and-velvet booths taking up the center of the lobby, creating what is effectively the office’s new town square.

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Weitz watches as people come together to eat, chat and even just throw a quick “hey, nice to see you.” He believes work-from-home arrangements aren’t suited to WME’s business. Representation always has been about relationships, he says. Hollywood, in other words, is an in-person job. “Even though the industry is changing, there are two things you can’t replace: community and collaboration,” explains Weitz. So when he and Christian Muirhead became co-chairmen of the storied agency in 2022, they made it a priority to renovate the headquarters to foster more face-to-face interaction. They asked global design firm Gensler to reimagine WME’s aging offices along Camden Drive, which hadn’t had a refresh in more than two decades.

“WME had been in this building for such a long time, and every time some other tenant moved out, they took over the space,” explains Brian Barry, Gensler’s design director, who led the renovation. As a result, the agency’s 10 floors were a Frankensteined amalgamation of styles flattened out by white paint and a vague Y2K futurism aesthetic: “It was all kind of cohesive, but not really.”

Over four years, Barry transformed the headquarters by replacing the sterility of the white paint with layers of organic materials (rich woods, brass, leather) and designing smaller, human-centric spaces where agents and clients could meet. A large, state-of-the-art listening lounge was built on the seventh floor so musicians could play new work for their team in a comfortable, modern setting. On the ground floor, the Chaplin Theater provides a similar experience for such WME filmmaker clients as Christopher Nolan, Ryan Coogler and Maggie Gyllenhaal. “We wanted every creative environment in the building to support the work at the highest level,” says Weitz. Adds Muirhead: “We spend our days working with people who obsess over every detail of their craft. It only felt right to create spaces that meet that same standard.”

Across the office floors, emphasis was placed on functionality. “The agents and their assistants have a very unique, very direct relationship,” says Barry. “So we created a sort of town hall on every floor with conference rooms and the improved pantries as a central destination.”

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The main design elements for these office spaces are the nearly 400 artworks hand-selected and supplied by Creative Arts Partners, whom WME had discovered after they supplied the artwork for Kevin Hart’s offices at HartBeat. “Our goal was, how do we put together a collection as creative as the amazing talent that WME represents?” explains Brian Ludlow, co-founder and CEO of Creative Arts Partners. The result is a beautiful array of original paintings, photography and even sculptural works that pepper the offices with names like Petra Cortright and Spencer Lewis.

It’s been years of disruption and change for WME, from the pandemic to the WGA and SAG strikes and the four-year construction of the office itself. Now, Weitz says he’s excited to have everyone back in the new office.

This story appeared in the Sept. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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